On Media Outlets That Continue to Describe Unknown Drone Victims As "Militants"

It has been more than two years since The New York Timesrevealed that "Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" of his drone strikes which "in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants...unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." The paper noted that "this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths," and even quoted CIA officials as deeply "troubled" by this decision: "One called it 'guilt by association' that has led to 'deceptive' estimates of civilian casualties. 'It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants. They count the corpses and they're not really sure who they are.'"

But what bothered even some intelligence officials at the agency carrying out the strikes seemed of no concern whatsoever to most major media outlets. As I documented days after the Times article, most large western media outlets continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as "militants"--even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware by that point that the term had been "re-defined" by the Obama administration into Alice in Wonderland-level nonsense.

Like the U.S. drone program itself, this deceitful media practice continues unabated.

Read the full article at The Intercept.